Boys
by AlienZombies
Summary: The product of man and God, what can be forged over the course of time, and what its purpose is. Implied KEITHxELLIS, hinted NICKXELLIS


This is a little different from most of the stuff I've written, I think. It's a lot less cluttered... I don't know. Let me know what you think.

**Boys**

"You don't give no great goddamn bout your boy!" Winnie Jacobsen-Heller screamed into her husband's face, her hair sweat-damp and tousled, clutching her wailing four-month-old son to her breasts, which were leaking through her pale blue floral nightgown. "You don't give a damn bout your family! You don't give a damn bout nobody!"

Sammy Heller, a fit boy not yet twenty years old, shook his head and cocked his baseball cap back from his eyes with the broad pad of his thumb. "Now, you listen here, missy –"

"Don't you dare talk to me like that," Winnie hissed. "Don't you even dare, now, you hear!"

"I'm gettin' out of here. I can't stand it. Don't you get it, Winn? Do you?"

She stared at him uncomprehendingly, her baby cradled to her neck now, where his cries were dying down. Her eyes were blue and frightened. "Sammy," she whispered. "You can't be doin' this to me. What am I goin' to do?"

"I don't know, Winn," he said quietly, the corner of his mouth quirking up in a feeble attempt to make her feel better. "I guess you could start your schoolin' again, I mean…"

"Don't leave me."

"Now, Winn, don't be sayin' it like that, Jesus… Please, now… Oh, Winn, don't cry…"

But Winnie _was_ crying. The sobs came from the pit of her gut, rasping out of her throat in deep barks. She put one trembling hand over her mouth, as if to stifle the noise, but it came anyway in wet, salty waves. Sammy put his hands in his pockets and shifted his feet uneasily, unable to quite look her in the face, and he ground his teeth on the last bitter grains of his spit tobacco.

"What am I gonna do?" she repeated. "Please, Sammy, no, no…"

"I got to, Winnie." He pursed his lips and then added, with painful impulsiveness, "I can't hardly stand you."

It was like a slap to the face. Winnie sat down hard in her favorite rocking chair, rocking her son with numbed, mechanical movements that made Sammy's mouth fill with bile. "Git on out then," she said, her voice low and vicious like a dog that's gone spoiled and feral. "You git on out of here, and don't you never come back."

"Shit," Sammy murmured. "Shit, shit, shit. You know I never meant any of this, Winn, you know that."

"Git on out."

He scooped up the duffle that held his life in it – his gun, his Copenhagen, three changes of clothes, $500 in cash, and a ticket to nowhere at all. "All right, I guess," he said quietly. "God, I'm sorry."

"Don't be apologizin' to me, it's God who's got his eye on you," she said. "You got God to talk with now."

"You tell our son I done runned out on you," he whispered. "You hear? You tell him what his daddy done. So that, you know… I guess so that he knows better. We're some awful shameful people."

Winnie bit out the words like bullets. "Ellis won't hear no goddamn word 'bout you, you slimy sonofabitch."

That probably hurt the worst out of everything. Sammy stared at that soft little blond head, his teeth grinding, and he was full of a cold and creeping kind of anger. The baby slept on unaware.

He slung his duffle over his shoulder and walked out the door. He hitched a ride on the bus and never went back.

He was killed three days later in Atlanta as he was crossing a street. A drunk driver behind the wheel of an enormous pickup slammed into him and dragged him three blocks before it occurred to them to stop. By that point, Sammy Heller's face had been peeled clean from the bone, and Sammy Heller's blood was streaked up the pavement like a grisly skidmark, and Sammy Heller was dead and gone.

* * *

Percy Carlisle staggered out of the bar at 3:00 in the morning, wrapped around some pretty young thing whose name he hadn't quite caught. The sun was rising, casting a faint pink glow in the distance, as they rode a taxi to some little apartment downtown. Percy bit the stranger's neck hard enough to leave bruises, but the boy only laughed and went on unbuttoning his shirt. His fingers were thick and nimble, warm to the touch.

Percy swallowed him whole and stored the experience away in a secret place, the things he could never do.

When morning became a flare of blue brilliance, Percy left the apartment and walked home. The fresh air did him good. He came through the door smelling like every little sin from the night before, and he felt too big for the cramped two-bedroom house he shared with his tired wife. His mouth tasted like copper and come.

Louise looked at him with bleak eyes and he coldly hated her and sweetly loved her all at once. She was rocking Nick in her arms – he was fussy with ear infections, which was costing them more than they could afford to fix.

"Where were you?" she asked him, even though she knew – he could see the answer in her pointed, pretty face. "Where were you?"

"Shut up, shut up," he muttered. His voice barely penetrated the high, shrieking wail of his son, who was flushed and trembling with fever.

"Don't you dare tell me to shut up, Percival Andrew Carlisle." Her voice was just a whisper. "I was worried sick."

Percy felt a headache building up just behind his left temple. Soon it would spread through the base of his neck and develop into a raging migraine, the same kind his son would inherit one day. He rubbed at his eyebrow wearily, deciding to avoid the skirmish and change the subject. "How's Nicky?"

"He has a fever and he throws up everything I give him, even water. I think we should take him to the doctor."

"Fine. Fucking fine. Fine."

Louise rubbed at her eyes like she was fighting back tears. Percy hated that their child had come out looking just like her.

"I've been up since midnight," she croaked. "God, so tired, I'm so so tired…"

"I'm sorry, Lou," Percy murmured. "Real sorry. Love you, babe."

"Do me a favor, would you, and bring me some Aspirin." She wouldn't meet his gaze.

He did, and took four tablets himself while he was at it. Nick screamed and screamed, snot running to his mouth in yellow streams, and when Percy picked him up to put him in the car, he puked all over his favorite silk shirt. This brought a fresh bout of tears.

"Fuck!" Percy shouted. "God _dammit_!"

"Don't yell at him," Louise said dully, taking the baby. "There, now, poor Nicky…"

Percy's hand itched to strike out, but by some miracle he refrained.

* * *

Winnie was distraught to realize just how very much Ellis turned out to be like his father. At just two years old, he had all of his father's prominent traits – his impatience, his sweet good nature when he had what he wanted, his skill for putting together small things to form a bigger thing. He even looked just like Sammy – with a shock of dirty blond hair and huge blue eyes. He smiled often. The only sign that he was indeed his mother's child was his penchant for crying, and crying often. He was a needy boy who loved his mother, but he took well to strangers. He asked "why" a lot, and made up stories with his trucks and the little dolls he stole from other girls who came over to play. Winnie tried to take them away, the dolls, because it wasn't right for a little boy to be so fond of them - and this made him cry.

She loved him, though, with every iota of her being. She loved her son.

Sitting on her well-worn couch, resting a hand over her deflated stomach – Ellis had been a big baby, almost ten pounds – she watched him push around his truck and make emphatic whooping noises. He was a late learner and didn't know a lot of words yet, for which she was sorry.

"Momma," he said to her, sitting on the floor with his truck in his hands. When he saw he had her attention, he grinned a huge smile (it was lopsided, like Sammy's had been, and it would probably always be). "Momma," he said again, delighted. He belched, and this made her laugh. He laughed boisterously and then climbed to his feet, racing through the trailer and upsetting the dog, Boone, who bow-wowed and chased him about.

Some part of her, the more vindictive part of her, felt blackly pleased that Sammy had missed out on this, that Ellis was all hers.

* * *

Percy was irritated to realize just how very much Nick turned out to be like his mother. He spoke every inch of his mother, except for his blistering wit which he must have gotten from Percy. Just like Louise, he was small-boned and a finicky eater, prone to illness, pale-skinned and dark-haired with sharp green eyes that would surely win over too many hearts. He had her pointed features and, sometimes, Percy thought he saw a flash of femininity in the child that paralleled him almost shockingly with his mother. He didn't like messes and his play-space was almost always pristine. Although only two years old, he was a brilliant child and quite eloquent and independent, often cleaning up after himself or, more often, getting into trouble. He rarely had fits of rage, but instead bided a bitter energy that came out in all sorts of nasty revenges – mud in the dishwasher, piss in their bed, juice on the carpet. He would bear his punishment with a cold, vacant expression that only fueled Percy's anger.

He almost always had ear infections or some sort of influenza. It was rare that he _wasn't_ running a temperature. Because of this he whined often and also vomited often. Their carpets were stained beyond repair.

It was early in the morning when they woke to Nick's fevered cries. Percy rolled over to wake Louise, but she was sobbing into her fists and couldn't be moved. Cursing and muttering to himself, Percy got up and went into his son's room, finding him on the floor (he must have rolled out of bed and hit his head, he thought), but as he came into the room he was smacked with the sharp, familiar smell of vomit.

He turned on the light and saw Nick braying up at him, his little face purple, his cries beginning to gurgle a little – and Percy realized with a horrible slowness that he was choking. He hefted up his son, so light, always a small and frail baby, and didn't know what to do, patting him and turning him over until finally Nicky puked again, weakly, a stream of white onto Percy's bare feet. He heaved in another breath at last and launched into a hysterical round of screaming, frightened and weak.

"Daddy!" he howled, and Percy's vision went black as he felt the hot puke oozing between his toes. "_Daddy, Daddy, Daddy_!"

Percy smacked him across the face. Nick hitched in a breath and then went eerily silent, his eyes wide and green and judging in the yellow light of the sunrise. He looked just like his mother.

"Shut up," Percy growled, and then, softer, "Oh, Nicky, my poor baby."

Nick was silent as Percy cradled him to his chest. His face was hot with fever. Probably his silence was more horrifying than the screams.

* * *

Winnie was returning home from another failed job interview when she got a call from the daycare. "Come get your son," they said, "before he causes a goddamn riot."

The daycare was run by Sally Morton, a fat young woman with a good spirit but a quick, righteous anger stemmed from her strictly religious upbringing. She stood on the steps with Ellis cradled in her round arms, his face nestled in the pillow of her bosom. Her mouth was twisted tight until it was nearly white as Winnie came up the walk. A few neighborhood children mobbed her, saying, "Winnie, Winnie, guess what Ellis done gone and done now!" because Ellis was always doing something or another on a dare, on a whim.

"What happened now?" Winnie asked, receiving her squirming son.

"Momma!" he bellowed excitedly, taking her face in his hands and kissing her.

"Hi, honey," she said absent-mindedly, swinging him onto her hip so that he wouldn't get in the way of her discussion with Sally.

Sally put her hands on her generous hips and shook her head. "Well, you won't ever believe it," she said, "but from what I'm gatherin', Ellis and Judas Schocter – you know the Schocters, don't you?"

"Yes'm, I believe I do."

"Well, Ellis and that Judas boy got to playin' house, and I guess Ellis came up with the idea to be the wife, and anyway, he was kissin' all over Judas, and –"

Winnie put a hand over her mouth, glancing down at her innocent little boy, who grinned toothily up at her. He was really too big to carry anymore, but she didn't have the will not to baby him. Had she been the one to do this?

Sally Morton wasn't finished. She scooped up a toddler who tried to descend the stairs, spinning him around and making him shriek with delight. "And _then_, Dave Johnson started in on him, what cause it wasn't right and he knew it wasn't right, and Ellis got in a _fight_ with him! Ripped out a handful of his hair and bit him all to hell. Though, if I'm to pay you a compliment in all of this, your son is a damn good scrapper. Poor Davey is worse for wear."

"Ellis!" Winnie gasped at her son, and he puffed out his cheeks irritably.

"Davey ain't got no right tellin' me what I can and can't do," he said stubbornly. "He's a tattle-tale and he's _bossy_."

"You should never ever hit anybody," Winnie scolded him. "Do you hear? That's not what good little boys do."

"He started it," Ellis muttered.

"I'm so sorry," Winnie said to Sally. Sally shrugged her meaty shoulders and chewed at her stubby fingernails.

"Well, we can't tolerate that sort of thing here. You sort out with your son what's wrong and right. If I see any more of that, he ain't welcome back."

"All right," Winnie said weakly. "All right, I'm sorry."

Sally herded a few gawking children back inside and closed the door. Somehow, her stern warning without any excess melodrama only made the situation somehow worse, more factual. For the first time in a while, Winnie felt as young as she actually was, only twenty-three years old – a scolded child. She hitched her son back up on her hips and walked him back to her worn-down old truck, putting him in the passenger's seat. He had a stubborn scowl on his face and a bruise on his cheek, the only remainder of his fight with Davey Johnson.

"Why'd you go and do a thing like that?" she asked him as they drove, feeling pale and baffled. The streets were mostly deserted of traffic, but Ellis stared out the window doggedly the entire way home. Winnie waited for a response and got none, so she probed some more. "Well? You'd best tell me or you're going to be in bigger trouble than you're already in."

"Well, goll-eee, Momma," Ellis grumbled. He was rarely cross, so he must have been tired. "I don't know why everyone's all upset. What cause I fought with Davey? He was bein' mean. Didn't want me playin' with Jonas."

"Cause the game you was playin' with Jonas was wrong, Ellis," Winnie said matter-of-factly. "Boys don't go kissin' other boys."

"Why not?" Ellis asked. It was his favorite question. "I like Jonas, like…" He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, crossing into sacred grounds of the five-year-old's heart. "_Like-like_ him. He's real pretty, Momma."

Winnie's stomach dropped out. "No, no he ain't."

"Yes he is."

"He's a boy, Ellis. Boys ain't pretty. And you ain't supposed to kiss them, neither. Boys are supposed to like girls."

Ellis was quiet, mulling this over. "Well that don't make much sense," he said finally. "I like Jonas."

"You ain't allowed to play with him no more."

It was then that Ellis began to cry, emotionally exhausted from the fight he'd had that day. "It's no fair!" he yelped at her, and Winnie tightened her grip on the steering wheel, wondering where she'd gone wrong.

There were no more incidents with Ellis after that.

* * *

Louise was drunk and passed out on the couch in the living room. Percy had had a couple but not enough to feel tired, not yet. Nick was playing in their bedroom, having found a pair of Louise's earrings that he had taken a peculiar liking to. He had a fondness for pretty things, collecting things he believed had worth, and he would probably be quite fiscal when he grew up. He had a tendency to hoard.

Recently, it had gone very quiet back there, and Percy wondered if Nick had just naturally slipped into his nap without being put down. He didn't like to miss anything and sometimes fell asleep in the middle of whatever he was doing.

It wasn't right to leave him sprawled out on the floor wherever he lay, though. Percy watched the last five minutes of the game before he dragged himself to his feet to check on his son. His mouth tasted stale and he needed a shave, he thought – but it had been a long time since he gave much of a damn.

That was when he heard the clink of something, and then the telltale thud of Nick dropping something onto the floor, the whispered, "Uh-oh."

Percy picked up the pace, striding into his bedroom, catching his son on his wife's dresser and going through her various makeup tubes and perfumes.

"Nicky!" he barked, and Nick turned around, his eyes wide and baffled.

"Shit," Nick said in his fragile voice, dropping the lipstick he'd been holding. It hit the dresser with a quiet click, and then it fell to the carpet and didn't make a sound.

Percy froze and stood there, staring at his son with dawning horror. Five-year-old Nicky had slithered into one of his mother's red nighties, silk and lace, the same one she had worn while they fucked two weeks ago. It draped off of his frail frame almost comically, pooling around his ankles, where his feet poked out. His left foot had one of Louise's leopard-print pumps on it; the other was bare. He had two little jeweled stickers stamped to his ears like earrings, and his face was caked with his mother's makeup – eyeshadow and mascara to his eyebrows and beyond. His lips were red and huge, and he had lipstick on his teeth. The room stank powerfully of perfume, as he'd probably sampled every bottle out of curiosity.

"What the _fuck_ are you doing?" Percy roared, and the color drained out of Nick's face.

"I'm sorry, Daddy," he began, but Percy was already upon him, dragging him off of the dresser by the fabric of his mother's nighty. The flimsy material purred and then ripped altogether, spilling Nicky half-naked onto the floor; he was clad in his tighty-whities, thank God, not his mother's underwear. Nick scrambled to his feet, losing his other high-heel shoe, and he took a deep breath to scream.

To his credit, he tried to make a break for it. He dived at Percy's legs and got around them, sprinting for the living room where his mother would protect him. Percy grabbed him by his arm hard enough to leave bruises, and Nick shrieked in pain, tumbling down onto the floor.

"No, no, no!" he screamed up at his father. "I'm sorry, Daddy, I'm sorry!"

Percy was filled with a cold, personal kind of fear and anger. Seeing this, himself echoed in his son in the most impossible of ways. But he wouldn't have his son growing up like him, God no – not in this dreadful double-life of men and his wife. It was painful, and he wouldn't have it. This couldn't be his fault, not Percy's fault, this wasn't something that he could have passed down. In the end, he wasn't sure who he was blaming, but it filled him with black fury nonetheless.

Nick made another lunge for freedom, squirming out his father's grasp.

"Come here!" Percy roared, and struck him, and then Nicky shut up, like he always shut up when it came to this part. He covered his face with his tiny hands, but didn't resist when Percy yanked them away and rained more blows down upon his little body. It was quiet except for that sound, the sound of fists.

His nose began to bleed, running in with the lipstick, and that was when Percy stopped. Tears streamed silently down Nick's resentful face, and he was completely limp as Percy pulled him in for a hug, the rage extinguished and filling him instead with its smoky after-dregs of shame.

"There, now, kiddo," Percy whispered into his hair. "Daddy's sorry."

Nick was silent. His breath came in tiny spikes.

The next day he woke up with an explosive fever and a deep, barking cough. Percy never caught him in his mother's closet again.

* * *

When Boone the dog died and Winnie married a big, red-shouldered man from Tennessee named Rod Logan, Ellis finally began to distance himself from his mother. He was nine years old and rarely at home, because whatever time he wasn't in school he devoted to his best friend Keith DuBois. They ran all around town together on their bikes until the sun set and Ellis returned home dog-tired and grinning. They were both good young boys, strapping and full of energy, though Keith seemed to spawn a troubling streak in Ellis that caused him to get into all sorts of messes.

Ellis brought Keith home with him from school that Friday. The plan was for Keith to spend the night. He was smiling kind of a boy with playful hazel eyes and hair that was somewhere between ginger, blond, and brown. His face was dusted in freckles, and when he stood beside Ellis they were like bookends.

The odd thing about Keith was that, as delicate and almost dainty as he could sometimes be, he often ended up in the hospital after attempting some dumb stunt or another. He had knocked out one of his teeth falling off of a roof on a dare, and he'd broken his arm twice so far. Ellis tried to emulate him, though, much to Winnie's pride, he did sometimes try to act as a voice of reason.

Rod didn't like Keith much. He complained about him regularly. "He's a sissy," he said to Winnie. "Can't you see it in him? He's a goddamn ass-fairy in the makin'."

To be honest, Winnie _couldn't_ see it. Keith had just as much of an interest in cars and wrestling and sports as Ellis did – but Rod had planted the seed of doubt. She was sure Ellis had put that phase with Jonas behind him, but there was always a chance of relapse, wasn't there? The Devil found weak spots in people and wormed in through them.

It was just past midnight, creeping into Saturday, when Winnie woke to a whispering kind of noise in Ellis's room. She'd managed to get a steady enough paycheck that they now lived in a small two-bedroom house, rather than the trailer. She crawled out of bed, trying not to wake Rod, who snored thunderously in his sleep, and padded across the hall to Ellis's room.

It was quiet. There was that whispering, somebody giggling. She put her ear against the door, heard nothing but more rustling and now Ellis's telltale cackling.

"Shush up, dummy," Keith hissed, and Winnie cracked open the door.

They were sprawled on their stomachs facing each other, playing a game of cards. Ellis was pulling faces at Keith over his cards and making Keith laugh.

Surely there was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

"Do you believe in soulmates?" Ellis asked Keith, and Winnie smiled.

"Aww, I don't know," Keith answered almost bashfully. "Like what do you mean?"

"I guess like, if there's some perfect for you all the way in China, that eventually you'll meet up if you play straight with God and He looks after you."

"I guess," Keith said. "Naw, I lied. No I don't."

"I do," Ellis answered. "There's someone out there right perfect for me."

They looked at each other and got twin grins. Keith called Ellis girly and made Ellis whine in protest.

Nothing to worry about. Winnie closed the door without a sound.

* * *

Percy drove over to the elementary school to pick up Nick early. He'd received a phone call from a hysterical teacher's aide talking about his son getting in another fight. Sure enough, as he pulled up in front of the school, he saw Nick squatting by the flagpole with his chin cushioned in his hands, a bored expression on his face. He honked his horn impatiently and Nick got into the car.

"Hey," Nick said blandly, yanking the door shut behind him. He got into the back seat, having learned that this was the safest place to avoid getting hit. He hugged his enormous backpack to his chest.

Percy turned around to look at his son. Nick had a black eye and a split lip and another bruise on his jaw. His usually straight, organized hair was a tousled mess atop his head.

"What'd you do this time?" Percy asked, and Nick rolled his eyes.

"I'll tell you," he said patiently, wrinkling his nose in irritation. "The teacher's aide is such a dumbshit who doesn't know what she's talking about. And she started getting all lippy when I got everything done in five minutes. It was supposed to take the whole period, I guess. So she made me go help Spencer Greene. And Spencer asked me, you know, he said, 'What do you think, Nicky?' and I said, 'I think you're a dumbfuck.' And he slugged me. I was being honest, Dad. Honest. So I kicked his ass."

"Uh huh," Percy said, stunned. Nick had said this all in the dullest of voices, that same lethargically bitter tone his mother used.

"So can I go home, or what? I can go hang around at Doug's house if you don't want me around."

"Sure, kid," Percy muttered, turning back around and pulling them out of the school's parking lot. He wondered vaguely how he had gotten stuck with this kid, this weird child who at nine years old was so eloquent and intelligent and yet so very cold.

When they got home, Nick went to his room and shut the door. Percy wasn't sure what he did in there. He'd put his ear to the door once to hear only silence.

Louise stirred from her dose on the couch. She was still a frail, pretty woman, but recently her inactivity was causing her to fill out in her thighs. "What happened?" she asked Percy. "Was Nicky bleeding?"

"A little," Percy said noncommittally, sitting in the other chair and turning on the news.

"Oh, Percy." She looked at him reproachfully with those green eyes.

"Shut up. I didn't hit him."

He could tell she didn't believe him, but nevertheless she laid her head back down again and fell asleep.

Quiet came from Nick's room.

* * *

Ellis's twelfth birthday came in a flurry of motion and color. Being such a kind, sincere boy, he purchased goodybags for all of his guests with his own money, earned from mowing lawns and shadowing in the local auto shop. Keith, his right-hand man, paid a ticket for him to visit Whispering Oaks, and they went off together for three days under the supervision of Keith's older brother Stanley, during which time Rod romanced Winnie with an earnestness that had been lost over the last few months of their marriage. A heat spell hit Savannah and filled the sky with a gargantuan yellow sun.

The world was full of a simple, dry heat when Ellis came home. He brought Keith with him like always, and he operated like an extension of their family, sharing the enormous chocolate cake and even feeding Ellis a few bites, which made Ellis laugh but made Rod shake his head. Ellis chuckled and lapped chocolate icing from his fingers, making an absolute mess of his clothing. Keith stole bites from Ellis's plate but ate with a clean efficiency that spoke of many family dinners with his mother scolding him for smacking.

"Look at you," Keith said, and Ellis's ears turned red.

"My mouth tastes good, anyways," he mumbled. He smeared icing all over his lips to the tune of uproarious laughter. Rod slipped Ellis a beer and Ellis drank it with impassioned pride, giving the last sip to Keith, who winked at him over the rim of the can.

"Don't worry about him," Winnie assured Rod that night as the boys got ready for bed. She could hear them hollering and squealing in the bathroom as they flicked water at each other. "If something was goin' to happen, it would have."

Rod pinched the bridge of his nose in his fat fingers. "There's no explainin' this to you, Winn. A man knows some things."

"I didn't marry you so that you could tell me the way things are," Winnie told him plainly, and Rod threw her a wry smile. His eyes were gray and bright against the darker plane of his face.

"Goodnight, Momma," Ellis chimed sweetly. His hair was beginning to darken with age, and now he looked even more like his father. Sometimes, Winnie wondered if that upset Rod, though he rarely commented. If he did, she might have something to say about it – Ellis was such a kind, easygoing boy, and she wouldn't see him hurt.

"Goodnight, pun'kin," she cooed to him, which made Keith giggle and tease Ellis. The boys went to bed.

"Don't trust it," Rod muttered to himself. "Just you watch."

Winnie murmured a prayer and went about cleaning up the cake.

* * *

When Nick's twelfth birthday came, he asked for one thing: a skateboard.

"Those things are death traps," Louise said, and he did not get a skateboard. He got five dollars and a pack of playing cards.

Nick took well to the cards. He played them often, and it was something that he could do by himself without making much noise. It was a toy that was easy to clean up and put away. On his birthday, he asked his father to play cards with him, and he beat him at blackjack twice, even after Percy had leniently allowed him a few drinks of his beer. Percy threw him against the wall and punched him hard in the ribs, and after that Nick retired to the silent place of his bedroom.

They had bought a strawberry cake that Nick only picked at, so it sat uneaten and drying on the counter. Percy dumped it in the trash.

Louise, high on the pills she'd been given for her phantom aches, looked at Percy dully and said with a wan smile, "Why don't we make love anymore?"

"Because," Percy muttered. A migraine was starting behind his eyebrow, and he rubbed it with his thumb. He hadn't had sex in two months, and that was with some college boy he'd picked up on a business trip in Los Angeles.

"Because?" Louise mocked, her cupid's bow lips curling into a dry sneer. "Because I don't have a dick?"

He knew where Nick got his bitterness. Percy smacked her, too, something he'd never done. She stared down at her hands in hitched in a few low, quiet breaths, but when she looked back up at him her eyes were dry.

"Fuck you, Percy Carlisle."

Three months later, she swallowed the entire refill of her prescription and left the earth forever. She died in her red nighty, a replacement for the one Nick had worn and Percy had torn, sitting at the head of the bed with a weird, bloody foam pooled in the corners of her mouth. Nick found her and had stood there for better than ten minutes before he calmly called the police and informed them matter-of-factly that his mother was dead. He said he couldn't remember the call, later, but that he had been fascinated by the way the blood on her mouth matched the color of her nightgown.

At her funeral, Nick didn't weep. He stood in the corner with his father, his lips quirked into a tired kind of smile like his mother used to wear, and he said with that customary apathy, "Shame she couldn't have taken me out with her."

When Percy slapped him twice, not sure how to deal with his anger anymore, the sound of it was dull and almost anti-climatic. Nick bore it with that same bland look on his face, rocking with the force of the blows. When it was over, he grinned terribly, his cheek red, and that was when Percy began to cry.

* * *

That boisterous, affectionate little boy had grown up into a strapping, chipper young man. Ellis had always been one of the largest boys in his class, but now he was short, wide in the hips and narrow in the shoulders. Running around in the hot sun had tanned his skin nicely, and God did he ever look just like his father once did. He had a broad, lopsided grin over his teeth which were just slightly too large – a big, pouty sort of mouth that Keith affectionately called his "front bumper."

At sixteen years old, he was beginning to look like he would actually try to graduate. Keith, however, dragged his feet, which worried Winnie. If Keith dropped out, Ellis would be quick to follow.

Recently, Keith had been having troubles at home. Winnie wasn't aware of it until he came knocking in the middle of the night with a black eye and a bloody nose, sobbing and asking for Ellis, who drew him into a long hug and said over and over to him, "You're all right, now" until Keith fell hard into a desperate sleep. It was his older brother who had done it, breaking in to steal their television so that he could buy heroin.

"He's always had a problem," Ellis murmured. "I guess now it's just done boiled over."

"Do you think he'll want to stay with us?" Winnie asked, stroking Ellis's hair, which seemed to soothe the nervous look in his eyes. "It's the least we can do, the poor thing."

Keith stirred, nuzzling his face into the crook of Ellis's neck; Ellis cinched his arms around him tighter. "No," Keith mumbled. "No thank you, ma'am… Couldn't be a bother."

"Sleep, now, sweetheart," Winnie soothed. "Now, El, why don't you take him to your room?"

Ellis ducked his head and whispered something in Keith's ear. Keith's eyebrows pinched together and he moaned softly, stumbling to his feet. Winnie watched them until Ellis stepped into his room and closed the door behind them; then she returned to bed, lying down beside Rod who, judging from his silence, was wide awake.

"What happened now?" he asked, his voice thick.

Winnie brushed her fingertips over the bristly scruff of his morning beard. "Keith visiting," she whispered. "He had troubles down by his house, I reckon."

When Rod went up to see what he could do, when he caught Ellis sprawled back on his bed with his ears burning red and Keith knelt down between his thighs, when he roared and cursed and let the fists fly, Winnie was the only one to stop him. She promised him a divorce in the morning, and Rod grabbed his housecoat and his wallet, jumped into his truck and drove away into the night.

Ellis knelt down on the floor and made a soft choking sound. He smudged away his tears before they would start, but Winnie could see him starting to cry. Keith tried to comfort him, and this started a squabble that sent them both into a fit of exhausted hysterics.

She had never felt so distant from him, not ever.

* * *

That frail, sickly little boy had grown up into a lithe, barbed young man. Nick had always been a small boy, but when adolescence took him up in its whirlwind of hormones he sprouted another solid three feet and now stood a head taller than many of his classmates. He was slender everywhere, but no longer alarmingly thin now that his bouts of illness were becoming fewer. He had never cared for sports and his unhealthy obsession with staying up late and staying indoors had turned his skin pale. He rarely smiled, but when he did, he looked exactly like his mother, thin-lipped but pretty. He always had dark circles under his eyes like dirty fingerprints.

At sixteen years old, he was only making a half-hearted attempt to graduate. He was a quick learner and coasted in all of his classes, rarely finishing his homework. He almost never came home, staying over at his friends' houses or, when he could steal Percy's credit cards, at local hotels. When he did come home, he adopted that same passive-aggressive nastiness Louise had exuded, and this always fueled Percy's temper.

One afternoon, after Percy had finished with a mediocre lay who was presently sleeping in his bedroom, Nick came home for the first time in more than a week. When he pulled the door open, Percy turned his head to see a pretty girl standing behind him. She had big blue eyes and blond hair that came down to her average-sized breasts. She was a skinny girl, so she complimented Nick well in that regard, her hips narrow and her legs long and lean. Her face was heavily made up and the type of jewelry she was wearing spoke of a wealthy background. She was smacking on a stick of gum.

"Hey, Pop," Nick said. He jerked his thumb in the girl's direction. "This is Cookie."

"He's my boyfriend," Cookie supplied quite pointlessly. She flashed a toothy grin. Just by looking at her, Percy could tell that she would grow up to be a bitch, but it was just as well because Nick would probably grow up to be cold and distant just like his mother, nitpicky and selfish.

"Well, at least I know whether you're a fag or not," Percy said to Nick. He felt a pang of cool fury when he saw that the insult had no visible effect on his son. That face was still a blank mask, the same look that passed over his face every time Percy hit him as a little boy until it was no longer a disguise but an identity. "I don't trust anyone," Percy had heard Nick saying once to his friend Frankie. "People are assholes." As if Nick had any idea just how black the world could really be.

"I just wanted to stop by and get my clothes," Nick said to Percy in a neutral voice. Cookie was looking around curiously. "I was wondering if you would lend me some cash."

"Fucking lend you cash," Percy echoed, and grinned wryly. "What the fuck for?"

"Oh, you know. Food, to live on."

"We've got plenty of food here."

Nick looked at him, expressionless. His eyebrows crept higher, just slowly, before he turned back to Cookie and said, "Come on then, babe. Let's get my shit."

"This is your place, Nicky?" she simpered. "You poor baby." She threw another fascinated look at Percy as they passed him, probably confused by the eyeshadow on his face, the scruff of his unshaven chin.

The morning tasted salty to Percy. The sky outside was heavily clouded, threatening rain, and the world had turned into shades of gray and blue. The wind had gone still.

When Nick exited his bedroom, laden with a backpack full of his underwear, the slut had stepped out of Percy's bedroom clad in a bathrobe. Cookie put a hand over her mouth, saying, "Oh."

"Percy?" the whore asked, trying to be sweet, even though his lisp was annoying and obviously manufactured, because he definitely hadn't been screaming "yeth! yeth!" last night. "Do you have any coffee?"

"No," Percy said shortly. He felt the judging gaze of his son on him as he left the house with Cookie in tow. His emotions warred with each other and settled on resentment for a compromise.

* * *

Ellis was seventeen, his lip bloody from a fight one of his friends had gotten in. He was always the type to jump in and help in a situation like that. He looked at his mother with eyes just like his father had, and he asked, "What makes a man a man?"

And Winnie had smiled at him, bemused, saying, "Why are you always full of questions?"

His lips quirked into an uncertain smile, but he didn't speak.

Setting down her sewing with a sigh, Winnie pushed her hair back from her face and smiled back at him. "A man is measured by God, Ellis, and ain't nobody else can tell him what he is."

That was when the tears began to flow. Winnie held him to her breasts as he bawled big, healthy sobs, crying for everything, and she loved him with a bright, fierce tenderness; she held him like she would never let go.

* * *

Nick was seventeen, his lip bloody from a fight he'd gotten into after scamming another boy out of twenty bucks over a betting game. He sat in the corner of the living room, reading, his shoulders hunched. There was a purple hickey on his neck from his girlfriend, Cookie. He had told his father he planned on marrying her and moving to Las Vegas, and Percy had struck out at him, but for the first time Nick had dodged the blow and ran. Percy decided to let it go.

He sat staring at his son across the room. Nick glanced up at him with those sarcastic green eyes but said nothing. His hair was perfectly straight, pulled back from his high forehead, not a hair out of place. He had an unusual liking for being clean and pretty – that hadn't changed no matter how he aged. Even now, he stood in stark contrast to his tired, run-down father. He was pretty and full of a weighted worldliness far beyond his years.

"I don't know where you came from," Percy commented.

Nick smirked but didn't look up from his book. "Neither do I."

"You ain't my son."

"I hope not."

Percy grabbed the ash tray and lobbed it at Nick's head. It missed by mere inches, smashing off of the wall and shattering into a million glittering pieces. The drywall dented and Nick sat there stunned in his chair, his face turning slightly green, and something in his face seemed to change – for a long minute, Percy couldn't place that foreign expression, and then he recognized the reddening of the flesh around Nick's brilliant eyes, the flushing of his nose. Nick's chest rose and fell sharply as he hitched in his breath.

Percy shambled to his feet, and Nick screamed, "_No_!" and tried to flee; Percy got a grip on his skinny arm and backhanded him hard across the face. Nick made a moaning sound and his knees gave out, and together they knelt down hard on the carpet.

"Come here," Percy growled, clutching at Nick fiercely, and Nick blindly grabbed at him and leaned into his shoulder, taking in a deep, shuddering breath. "Nicky, Nicky, my baby…"

For the first time since he was a very little boy, Nick cried.

"I'm sorry for everything," Percy whispered into his hair, and Nicky, weeping, said over and over, "I'm sorry, Daddy, I love you, Pop…"

The next morning, they got in another fight and Percy broke Nick's nose. Nick ran away again and didn't come home for two weeks, and things were as they had always been.

* * *

The minute Ellis turned eighteen, he had one foot out the door. It wasn't that he didn't love his Momma, but rather that he was a boy with big dreams who needed space and time to realize them, and Winnie understood that. She baked him cookies and cried when he climbed into the passenger's seat of the souped-up monster truck he and Keith had built together, even though they were only moving halfway across town into a little trailer they had saved up for with their own blood, sweat, and tears. They had tacked a little wooden sign to the door that said "KIDDIELAND" in big, loopy letters, courtesy of their artistic friend Jeremiah.

All of their friends were piled in the truckbed of that monster truck, and they whooped and waved at tipped their hats to Winnie as she kissed Ellis on the cheek and sent him off.

"We'll look real well after your boy!" Bobby called, waving his baseball cap at her.

"I can't count on you for anything," Winnie replied, amused. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head.

Dave, the boy who Ellis had once punched out as a child but who was now one of his most trusted friends, said to Winnie, "I'll keep extra sure that he goes to church, ma'am."

"You'd best."

"We'll run a good Christian business."

"So I'd hope."

"I love you, Momma!" Ellis called out the window. His face was sun-kissed and he had a wild grin on his face. "I'll visit every Sunday, promise!"

"Yeah!" Keith chimed in, leaning over Ellis's shoulder. In all retrospect, she should have separated the two of them once Rod had found them out – but she couldn't quite bring herself to do it, couldn't bear to see the pain in her son's eyes again. Together, now, leaning out the window, they looked like normal folks, good boys, not sinners. "And thanks for the cookies, ma'am!"

That was when they all started to laugh. Hot tears slipped down Winnie's cheeks and she dabbed them away with her apron. The truck farted and roared and then lurched down the street, the boys in the back of the truck yipping and hollering as it turned the corner and then was gone. It was too quick, too simple to Winnie, too soon.

Her heart full of unanswered questions, Winnie went back inside the house, which felt so big now with only her in it, and closed the door behind her.

* * *

The minute Nick turned eighteen, he had one foot out the door. He had a backpack full of his father's money and a bus ticket to nowhere. It was sunrise, but Percy was up with a bad case of insomnia, and when Nick opened the door, he flooded the house with the sun's pale light.

"Where are you going?" Percy asked, trying not to sound as drunk as he was.

Nick turned back to look at him. His silhouette cut sharply against the sky. "Away," was his answer.

"Forever?" Somehow, Percy could sense that it was indeed forever.

Nick didn't move for a very long time. Percy couldn't make out his face. Then, in a quiet voice, Nick said, "Yeah, I guess. I guess. I've got to make it big somewhere, you know? Make something out of nothing."

"Write me sometimes, won't you, son?"

"Sure, Pop." Every inch of Nick's voice spoke a pained lie.

"I love you, kiddo."

"A lot of shit happens to everybody," Nick said softly to himself.

Unable to think of an answer, Percy swirled his coffee in his hands and found the taste of the brandy in it bitter.

Nick switched his backpack to the other shoulder with a sigh. Outside, the engine of his girlfriend's car was the only noise. "Hey, Pop," he began, and then failed to complete the thought.

"What, Nicky?"

"Do you believe in fate? Like, something is meant to happen, someone you're meant to meet?"

"Don't know, kid. I don't know."

Nick swallowed loudly. "See you," he said quietly.

"All right." Percy put his face in his hands. He wanted very badly to sleep.

Making a quiet sound like a whimper, Nick stepped outside and closed the door behind him. Percy never got to see his face that morning, and never saw it again – and for months afterwards, he felt guilty for never catching his son's expression as he said that last goodbye. It was all so sudden, in a way, as if they had been ripped apart.

Percy died of liver disease at the age of forty-three without having received a single phone call from Nick. In some strange manner, it was better that way, better not to know.

* * *

There was a terrible smell in the city. It was that awful smell of a million people rotting on a hot summer day. Parts of Savannah were completely without electricity. It was the last thing Nick expected to see when he stepped off of that boat, the last place he had expected to be in, and yet, as if drawn by something greater than himself, he had landed himself here. He was thirty-five years old and wondering where he would find his last stand.

Ellis smiled at him tiredly in the dark as they rested their aching legs. "Here," he said, and passed Nick an opened granola bar. "I got that for you."

Nick raised an incredulous eyebrow but accepted the gift without critique. He was aloof and sometimes even chilly, but Ellis chipped away at him nonetheless. He had a youthful determination to him that was both refreshing and alienating to Nick. Ellis was only twenty-three years old, but he had a brilliant power hidden in him, some sort of unchecked legacy. And though he would never admit it, Nick was fascinated.

"You ever wonder 'bout God at a time like this?" Ellis asked him now, smiling as he swallowed a bottle of lukewarm water.

"No," Nick answered, watching Rochelle and Coach share a box of stale cereal.

"Sometimes I wonder if he's got a real plan. What cause I figure… everything happens for a reason. Like one time, my buddy Keith flipped a coin to see, you know, if he should go out to the lake or crawl around in the air ducts at the abandoned theater. He got heads, so we went to the lake, and good thing cause it turns out the theater was under demolition that day and they knocked the whole thing flat by that afternoon. Keith would've been smashed to smithereens. I figure God had a hand in that coin toss."

Nick stared at Ellis's earnest face, not sure whether to be amused or mortified. "You're something else. You're telling me these walking corpses are part of some great divine goddamn plan?"

Ellis grinned at him without embarrassment, and then rerouted his statement. "I guess I believe, you know – if us four folks was meant to meet, ain't no hell or high water what could have kept us apart in the end."

"You make no sense, Overalls," Nick said blandly, and returned to his granola bar.

"What makes a man who he is today?" Ellis asked now. His voice was low and sweet.

"Stop asking so many dumbass questions."

They both laughed, quiet and uneasy, before lapsing into silence.

And then there was nothing but the sound of wind, the smell of decay, the downward swing of the sun – and the two of them in the center of it, colliding.

- **the end**


End file.
